Lesson 18 • January-18

Practice Instructions

Purpose: To continue to teach you that your thoughts are not without effect. The preceding lessons have emphasized that they always affect your mind. This lesson emphasizes that they always affect all minds.

Exercise: Three or four times, for one minute or so (perhaps less).

Look around you, randomly selecting subjects and resting your glance on each one long enough to say, "I am not alone in experiencing the effects of how I see ______."

Conclude by repeating the idea.

Commentary

The concept that "minds are joined" (1:2) is easy to grasp, but literally far-reaching in its implications. How I see things affects other minds, not just my own. The miracles that the Course can bring into our lives will prove this to us time and time again. A shift in the way I see things can bring about miraculous effects in people around me:

A miracle is never lost. It may touch many people you have not even met, and produce undreamed of changes in situations of which you are not even aware.(T-1.I.45:1-2)

The fact that how I see things affects more than just myself makes the thoughts that give rise to my seeing even more important. How I think and perceive things affects, quite literally, the entire world. By opening my mind to love I can be a conduit of love for the world.